I strongly disagree with this take. The borrow checker, and rust in general, keeps reasoning extremely local. It's one of the languages where I've found that difficulty grows the least with codebase size, not the most.

The borrow checker does make some tasks more complex, without a doubt, because it makes it difficult to express something that might be natural in other languages (things including self referential data structures, for instance). But the extra complexity is generally well scoped to one small component that runs into a constraint, not to the project at large. You work around the constraint locally, and you end up with a public (to the component) API which is as well defined and as clean (and often better defined and cleaner because rust forces you to do so).